(a) Field of the Invention
This invention pertains to a computer-implemented system that creates visual project reports where sets of tasks and milestones can be assigned graphical formatting based on default styles, or based on rules that test task or milestone data attributes.
(b) Discussion of Prior Art
Project management is as much about communication as it is execution, but projects by their very nature are complex, which makes it difficult to effectively communicate the big picture to stakeholders or executives.
Commercially-available project management software such as MICROSOFT® Project or ORACLE® PRIMAVERA® P6® focus on the management of project details, but do a rudimentary job of creating visual reports that are concise and are easy for laypeople to understand. Reporting out of these project management software applications has little ability to apply meaningful sets of data-driven shapes, colors, border formats, sizes, and fonts that would improve the quality of project communications. Lack of such stylistic control impairs the project manager's ability to convey consistent meaning to project stakeholders.
As a result, project managers often revert to drawing tools such as VISIO® diagrams or POWERPOINT® presentations to manually illustrate their project data in a more flexible and visually-meaningful format. These charts are often rich in graphical formatting and therefore easier to understand, but they are created by manually editing shapes and therefore lack the capability to apply a style or set of styles to a project report in an automated fashion. Furthermore, projects change with time, and manually-created formatting affords no way to automatically update the task dates and progress while preserving the formatting. Finally, projects often exist in the context of a portfolio of related projects and yet manual formatting affords no way to enforce consistency from one project to the next.
This problem has been addressed in other fields through the use of rules-based formatting (“conditional formatting”), which is well-known in the financial sector when determining the style of cells in an EXCEL® spreadsheet (U.S. Pat. No. 7,634,717 B2). Cells in an HTML table can also be formatted based on a set of rules (U.S. Pat. No. 6,851,088 B1), however nether HTML tables nor spreadsheets provide an adequate graphical representation of a project plan, which typically contains many tasks and milestones scattered along a timeline, based on start and finish dates, among other data elements.
Rules-based formatting, while a common method in other industries, has never been applied by a project management software application without first requiring changes to project data. As a result, the process of presenting projects effectively is a tedious and time-consuming effort for any project manager who needs to summarize a project in a way that makes good use of colors, shapes, fonts, border styles, and sizes.